KoreaCrunch

Google has innovated online geospatial service as like Google Maps with high quality satellite images, street view, oceanic exploration and Google Earth with 3D images and SketchUP in global scale. They were brilliant ideas and many people were impressed. But, recently Korean web service made another remarkable map services in local scale. Daum and Naver invested many money to build these high quality service too. Aerial Photography Daum launched new map features "road view" and "sky view" on January in this year. The image of sky view is converted into high-resolution aerial photography, with the restaurant's roof, driveway and the sea becoming ...

Naver Open API announced Korean Maps API. It's first thing to offer local map by service provider in Korea. (maybe in the world?) It resembles Google Maps API by Naver Maps API overview. You can catch an mouse event and add controls such as zoom in/out, save button and annotation etc. A source of map images was given by Sundo Soft, an exclusive ESRI's korean vendor. Naver customized it and included it to their open APIs. This map use not standard longitude/latitude but (korean own) Katel coordinate system. Maybe it will be hacked formula between global and katel coordinate. Anyway it helps ...

Did you visit a famous place and take pictures? You had a delicious dinner in a beautiful restaurant? Or did you have a worst place to avoid it? You can make a story on map. You can make it on Cyworld Map Story that can mark own minihompy's story and photo to specific places. The Cyworld Map is Ajax-based service to offer interactive behaviors as like Naver Maps. This is similar with Platial or WayFaring to mark own places based on Google Maps. But, it links stories by various people and can share them. There are similar function in Wingbus, ...

I wrote Korea has been served the interactive map service made by ActiveX and Java applet by broadband and IE exclusive environment in my A Mashup with Google and Korean Map. Unfortunately Firefox users cannot use map services in Korea. But, Naver firstly changed its map service to Ajax based without Active X plugins. In korea, there are several map service providers Congnamul and SundoSoft. Sundosoft is the provider of Naver and Nate. So I expect most of portal will change to operate their map service under cross browsers and platforms.